The Shifting Sands started as a collection of songs written by Michael McLeod after deciding to take a new direction from his previous band The Alpha State (who released an acclaimed album “Lines” on Failsafe Records in 2008). McLeod embarked upon making what began as a solo album, along the way collaborating with many of Dunedin’s finest musicians past and present, including David Kilgour (The Clean), Robert Scott (The Clean, The Bats), Robbie Yeats (The Verlaines, The Dead C), Lesley Paris (Look Blue Go Purple), Jay Clarkson (The Expendables, Breathing Cage), Rob Falconer (Operation Rolling Thunder), and Tony de Raad and Tom Bell (David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights).

Production duties were shared between Tex Houston (The 3Ds – Hellzapoppin, The Clean – Mister Pop) Thomas Bell (The Clean – Getaway, David Kilgour and Sam Hunt – Falling Debris, Left by Soft), and McLeod himself.

The debut album by The Shifting Sands is the kind of psychedelic pop we love at Fishrider Records, alternating between the dreamy and the urgent. While the hyper-melodic jangle-pop sometimes references the “Dunedin sound”, the injection of synthesizer and sitar into the mix turns everything on its head. As indeed does the balance of extremes provided by the almost weightless floating-on-air of the title track “Feel” against the surging Eastern drone-pop of “The Kitchen Sink”

The album seems soaked in the atmosphere of life on the remote South East coast of this unstable island on the edge of the world – the light and dark, the joy and melancholy, the open spaces of the inland planes and claustrophobia of Dunedin’s perimeter of often cloud-lined hills.

The Shifting Sands has grown to become an entrancing live band with Thomas Bell (David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights) on bass a regular fixture around an appropriately shifting cast of live collaborators. The Shifting Sands tour the South Islands of New Zealand in late April and will tour the North Island later in the year.